The Family—Then and Now
By ELIZABETH PAKENHAM
0 UR feelings about the family have grown steadily warmer over the past twenty years. The war thawed out the last relics of coldness left over from the 1920s, and the Royal Commission on Population made everyone aware of the dangers of an ageing population, and the need to keep up the supply of children in a healthy nation. Family allowances, introduced at the end of the war, were a first sign of the change. Today the idea of the family is in high favour again.
But if these economic considerations were alone responsible for the change, we might well expect to see a swing-back at any moment; a period of acute unemployment might do it, or a really big Malthusian scare. However, beneath economic argu- ments I believe there runs a more subtle and indefinable feeling which may be profound enough to develop and endure. We can understand this new feeling by trying to remember how and why the family idea fell from popularity after the First War.
At its most superficial level criticism fastened on the family as being socially dowdy. For the rich to have many children was to be lacking in smartness and modernity. It might be possible to get away with one or at the most two—chiefly for the purposes of studio photography—but a nursery full of children of all ages was unthinkably Victorian and definitely unsmart. Among the middle and lower income-groups a large family was supposed to indicate lack of education and " know- how ' ; those who indulged in it automatically stamped them- selves as near-working-class. (Even since the last war this feeling that large families are socially degraded still crops up now and again. When my own family began to reach reason- able, but certainly not Victorian, proportions,* the birth of a child usually brought me one or two indignant anonymous letters among the many kind ones. " People of your education ought to know better. It's a perfect disgrace to your class. These family allowances—that's where our taxes go to.") Be- fore the war the middle and lower income-groups invented a slogan which admirably summed up their attitude : " It's better to have a Baby Austin in the garage than a baby in the cradle." There was a feeling that a car or wireless-set gave one a distinct cachet, whereas babies did the opposite.
On a higher level criticism assailed the family on sociologi- cal, philosophical and even political grounds. The family was represented as being the most selfish, because the smallest, unit in the community. It was narrow and self-centred, bound up in tradition, infected with an endemic property-complex, and in fact epitomised all the most reactionary and anti-pro- gressive elements in the body politic. It was the happy hunting-ground of parental tyranny and marital possessiveness. Galsworthy showed it all to us in The Forsyte Saga, and so did H. G. Wells and many others. Family life was seen bah to stifle the individual and at the same time to starve the com- munity of the service rightly due to it.
On a more practical plane it was widely felt that parents, of all people, were least fitted to give their children a good upbringing. Scientifically-run, unemotional institutions could do it far better. Hence the fashion for hastening toddlers into creches and nurseries at the earliest possible age—not just in order to get rid of them but genuinely for their own good. Young children should be rescued from the emotional morass of their parents' home, where they were bound to be given either too much love or not enough. It was naïvely assumed that the day-nursery or school would give just the right amount. Even when retained in the bosom of its family, the child, according to progressive thought, should be submitted to a bracing but rather forbidding atmosphere, involving long hours alone in a cot or play-pen.
* Lady Pakenham has eight children.
I well remember, when my first baby arrived almost exactly twenty years ago, the austere and bleak system of child-rearing to which I turned for aid in my ignorance. It was rightly famous, and had done much to exorcise Victorian fussiness in clothing and unscientific dietaries. But at times, in our reaction against the swansdown capes and frilled bonnets, we almost threw away the baby with the layette. We were careful to " man-handle ' our children as little as possible. We laid them on tables to dress them, not on our laps (which in the 'twenties and 'thirties were not fashionable if they were capacious). Contact with things was better for babies than contact with people. Our kisses, we were told, were probably contaminating; we mothers must do it as little as possible, and never allow anyone else to.
Of course our instinct revolted from time to time; and we fed them when they were hungry and picked them -up when they cried in the night, instead of just turning them over and offering them a drink of plain boiled water, as we were taught. I trace the change myself, from my own personal experience, to a moment at the beginning of the war when suddenly I heard, from authoritative lips, that mother-love was once again " a good thing." An eminent physician came down to Oxford to address our local baby-club. He told. us the story of a sick baby languishing for weeks in a hospital, until a famous consultant ordered a new treatment. " Send it home to its mother today. Tell her to mother it for all she is worth; take it into her bed if she wants to. [We gasped.] The hospital has done all it can for it. Now it needs its mother and family." The audience felt a new and exhilarating sense of importance.
Ten years or more have passed since then, and the status of the family has been raised in the eyes of all, from the most pro- gressive and scientific expert down to the woman who reads " Family Page " in her daily paper. I will only mention two instances of this change in public opinion—two events which I believe could not have happened twenty years ago. The Curtis Report on the Care of Children, published after the war, strongly advocated fostering in families for "deprived" children, rather than institutional life. Today welfare officers spend endless patient hours seeking and finding suitable homes; while the institutions themselves are organised more and more into small family units, despite the extra expense and trouble involved. Indeed many people would go as far as arguing that the State should pay the unmarried mother enough to enable her to look after her own child at home, instead of sending it to a residential nursery (at a cost of £8 a week) and going out to work herself.
In Britain we seem to prefer helping the family in kind rather than with money, unlike the French, for instance. Cer- tainly there is much to be said for this method. School-meals, milk, orange-juice and cod-liver oil have all gone to the child- ren they were meant for. It has also educated millions of parents in things that their children needed. How many of those millions would have thought of orange-juice or oil if the Food Offices had not shown the poster of the child with, the wheelbarrow; and the rows of coloured bottles acquired for only a coupon or two and a few 21d. stamps ? Even so, there are still those who attack school-meals and milk as " undermining family spirit and responsibility." During the Election in 1950, when I was a candidate at Oxford, I carried on a long argument in the Press with a man who remembered a horde of children running home from school to their mothers at dinner-time, and drawing therefrom spiritual and physical sustenance. But not a single woman wrote to support his view.
The Curtis Report was published in 1946. Last month a conference was held in Oxford on " The Stability of the Family," at which thirty-two nations were represented. It created great public interest, and was reported every 'day for a week in the daily Press. Could such a thing have happened in 1932 ? I cannot believe it. It is possible, of course, that the family is attracting attention today precisely because of its weak position in our national life. Maybe the anti-family pundits have not really changed their spots, but simply feel that the family is no longer a foe worthy of their steel. Cer- tainly the rulers of Imperial Rome extolled family virtues more and more loudly the less they were practised. But in Britain the change in attitude between 1932 and 1952 seems to be more positive, more hopeful.
That the family is and will remain the basic unit of all human society seems to be accepted as a fact just as elemental in its own way as the fact that there are two sexes. It follows that its stability and happiness must be all our care. Houses must be built, fireplaces and sinks designed, gardens and play- grounds laid out to suit the family. Taxes must be adjusted on its behalf. Even the oft-maligned television must be wel- comed, in so far as it keeps the family together in the home. These are superficialities. Perhaps the deepest reason for our renewed interest in the family lies in something not touched on in this article—the parallel awakening in our religious life. If this is so, may they both march forward together.
Previous page
